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How to be a PhD student (by someone who just was), Part 1: Preparing for the programme
In December 2013, after three years and two months of work, I submitted my PhD thesis. Last month, I successfully defended it, and made the (typographical) corrections in two nights. I’m a Doctor! It’s still exciting to say. A PhD is certainly not easy — I’ve heard it compared to giving birth, starting and ending…
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Twitter’s reaction to the Benefits Britain live debate
Benefits Street was a series of television programmes broadcast by the Channel 4 outlet between 6th January and 10th February 2014 which, as Channel 4 have claimed, “sparked a national conversation about Britain’s welfare system”. The programme focussed on a community of people living in the economically deprived area of Winson Green, Birmingham and specifically…
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Opportunity for a PhD student to work with the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science
The ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS), in conjunction with Cognizant, is offering a suitably qualified PhD student the opportunity to work on a project focussed on Twitter usage and brand management. The successful candidate will work at Cognizant in Bangalore on a joint project looking at the role the social media…
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The Twitter reaction to the sentencing of the Lee Rigby murderers – 26th February 2014
by Love, R., McEnery, T. & Wattam, S. Introduction The ESRC-funded Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) at Lancaster University has undertaken some preliminary research into the immediate reaction on Twitter to the sentencing of the Lee Rigby murderers on Wednesday 26th February 2014. This document summarises our findings. Background On the afternoon…
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Update on Changing Climates
The Changing Climates project is a corpus-based investigation of discourses around climate change. It aims to examine how climate change has been framed in the media coverage across Britain and Brazil in the past decade. Here, we look at two different scenarios. Recent surveys have shown that climate change is currently considered a high priority…
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Introducing CASS 1+3 Research Student: Robbie Love
In 2013, the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science was pleased to award its inaugural 1+3 (Masters to PhD) studentship to Robbie Love. Read a bit about the first year of his postgraduate experience, in Robbie’s own words below. I am a Research Student at CASS in the first year of a 1+3…
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Introducing Challenge Panel Member: John Flowerdew
Our latest Challenge Panel introduction comes from Professor John Flowerdew via the City University of Hong Kong. Read his brief autobiography below. The person who introduced me to corpus linguistics was the sadly departed John Sinclair of Birmingham University and later the Tuscan Word Centre, a man who can be considered a doyen of corpus…
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Using Corpora to Analyze Gender
I wrote UCAG during a sabbatical as a semi-sequel to a book I published in 2006 called Using Corpora for Discourse Analysis. Part of the reason for the second book was to update and expand some of my thinking around discourse- or social-related corpus linguistics. As time has passed, I haven’t become disenamoured of corpus methods,…
CASS Briefings
CASS: Briefings is a series of short, quick reads on the work being done at the ESRC/CASS research centre at Lancaster University, UK.